Bombs away

A suitable case for pre-emption?

AMERICA and many other countries are convinced that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. But Iran denies this, and after the intelligence bungles in Iraq such claims need to be examined with care. The Iranians remind the world that their soldiers were victims of Saddam's poison-gas attacks during the Iran-Iraq war, and that they never retaliated in kind. Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, has gone so far as to issue a fatwa (religious decree) declaring the possession or use of WMD in general, and nuclear weapons in particular, to be illegal under Islamic law.

Furthermore, Iran's leaders point out that unlike existing nuclear-weapons states in their neighbourhood, such as Pakistan, India and Israel, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has therefore submitted itself to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the treaty's watchdog. When asked why a country overflowing with oil and gas should want nuclear energy, Iran answers that its oil revenues will one day diminish and that in the meantime nuclear energy at home would free more petrol for export. Besides, say the Iranians, America and other Western countries were happy to help the shah establish a nuclear industry before the revolution. Why should what America deemed to make economic sense at that time be thought absurd now?

It should also be noted in Iran's defence that the nuclear agency has as yet found no conclusive evidence that Iran is running a nuclear-weapons programme. In a report to the IAEA's governors last March, Mohammed ElBaradei, its director-general, said only that until Iran gave the agency more information about its nuclear activities—some of which it kept secret for many years—his agency would “not be able to provide assurance regarding the exclusively peaceful nature of all of Iran's nuclear activities”. In short, the IAEA has no firm evidence that Iran is trying to make a bomb, but it has plenty of suspicions and cannot give it a clean bill of health.

The IAEA, however, is a cautious organisation with a mixed record. In the 1980s it failed to detect Iraq's nuclear-weapons programme at a time when it was in fact making rapid progress. In Iran, the agency's attempts to monitor nuclear activities have been hampered by years of deception. And Iran's credibility suffered a massive blow in 2002 when a dissident group, perhaps tipped off by Western spies, revealed that the country had built two nuclear facilities in secret without informing the IAEA. One of these, in Arak, was a heavy-water reactor, just the thing for making plutonium, which is one way to fuel an atomic bomb. The other, at Natanz, was a facility for enriching uranium, which is the other way of doing it.

It is true, as Iran says, that the centrifuges at Natanz can also make the less enriched fuel that a nuclear reactor would need for producing electricity. But since Iran does not yet have any such reactors (other than the one the Russians have built for it at Bushehr, which comes with Russian-supplied fuel), why the rush to enrich? Why try to keep both Arak and Natanz secret? And why has Iran apparently co-operated with both North Korea and A.Q. Khan, Pakistan's notorious nuclear-weapons smuggler?

Iran's answer to these questions is that it was forced to keep these nuclear activities secret because America was intent on blocking its civil nuclear programme, even though having such a programme was its “inalienable right” under the NPT. Iran also argues that under the letter of the law it was not required to disclose the existence of these facilities until uranium enrichment actually began—which, it says, it intended to do.

In 2003, embarrassed by the discovery of its secret facilities, Iran agreed to implement the “additional protocol” of the IAEA, making its facilities available for fuller inspection. After negotiations with Britain, France and Germany it agreed to suspend uranium enrichment. But it continued to insist on its right to resume it, and in August 2005, the month of Mr Ahmadinejad's inauguration, it did so—even though the three European governments had offered it economic and civilian-nuclear help in exchange for stopping permanently. In June 2006 the incentives on offer for nuclear compliance were both broadened (all five permanent members of the Security Council, and Germany, endorsed them) and sweetened. Condoleezza Rice said that if Iran accepted, America would drop its long-standing refusal to negotiate directly with Iran and open talks on a wide range of subjects.

From America's perspective this was a big concession. And yet, for one reason or another, Iran did not bite. And in the past year its readiness to pay a growing price for its determination to press on with enrichment and so master the entire nuclear-fuel cycle has inevitably added to suspicion of its intentions. Part of that price has been losing the diplomatic protection that Russia and China had previously given it in the Security Council. In July 2006 the council ordered Iran to suspend enrichment. Its refusal resulted in two further resolutions—in December 2006 and March 2007—imposing modest sanctions, with a third now in preparation. And yet the centrifuges spin defiantly on. Little wonder that the working assumption in many capitals is that Iran wants the bomb.

If that assumption is correct, how soon might it get one? Mr Ahmadinejad keeps claiming that Iran has already passed the stage of no return in its attempts to master enrichment, but continues to deny that Iran wants the bomb. “We have broken through to a new stage and it is too late to push us back,” he said in June. Most outside experts, however, are sceptical about how much progress Iran has made.

A common estimate is that in order to produce enough fissile material for a basic device, Iran would have to run an array of some 3,000 centrifuges at high speed for more than a year. Mr ElBaradei told a meeting of the IAEA last month that Iran already had between 1,700 and 2,000 centrifuges running, and predicted that this number could rise to 3,000 by the end of July. But the amount of uranium hexafluoride—the gas put into the machines for enrichment—has been relatively small, suggesting to some analysts, including the IAEA, that Iran is not yet confident of its ability to spin them at full speed.

One respected expert, David Albright, president of America's Institute for Science and International Security, reckons Iran would be lucky to be able to enrich enough uranium for a bomb by 2009 and that to complete all the other steps necessary to make a usable weapon could take another year or more. Israel says that if Iran's programme went very smoothly, it could have a bomb by 2009. Mr ElBaradei, who makes no secret of his belief that it would be “crazy” to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran, says an Iranian bomb, if that is what Iran wants, is between three and eight years away.

Reasons for wanting the bomb

So what if Iran got the bomb? Wouldn't its only purpose be to deter? Iran does after all have a history of being bullied and invaded. In the 19th century Britain and Russia played their “great game” on its territory. Britain and America engineered the coup that unseated an elected prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953. After Iraq's invasion in 1980 the United Nations did precious little to help Iran. And in 2002 Iran found itself listed as part of George Bush's “axis of evil”, at a time when America had just sent one army into neighbouring Afghanistan and prepared to send another into neighbouring Iraq.

All this—plus loose talk in Washington, DC, about “regime change” in Iran—may have convinced the country's leaders that Iran needs a bomb simply to make potential attackers think twice. But if Iran has reason to want a bomb, others have bigger reasons to fear it. Israel is foremost of these. Whereas Israel had good relations with the shah, Ayatollah Khomeini regarded the creation of the Jewish state as an unforgivable sin and said that all Muslims had a duty to reverse it.

On Israel, Iran has indeed shown less flexibility than the Palestinians themselves. It denounced Yasser Arafat's espousal of a two-state solution as a betrayal and it continues to arm and train groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah that say they want to destroy Israel. During the reformist period, President Khatami softened Iran's stand, implying that it might respect whatever solution the Palestinians accepted, but Mr Ahmadinejad, in numerous Holocaust-denying speeches calling for or predicting Israel's eradication, has returned Iran noisily to the true faith.

Enrichment pleaseEyevine

These pronouncements have led commentators in the West to ask whether Iran's president is a new Hitler with genocidal designs. But a close look shows them to be ambiguous. It is not clear, for example, whether he really doubts that the Holocaust occurred or merely why such an event should have been allowed to justify Israel's creation. In the blogosphere translators hold lively debates about whether he really did call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” or just “removed from the pages of time”, a phrase which some people seem to think sounds less fierce. In the mind of Mr Ahmadinejad, are Israel and its people to disappear in some violent event? Or is it merely the “Zionist regime” that is to come to an end—perhaps peacefully, after the Palestinian refugees have returned and decided by referendum?

If Israel is to disappear, will Iran be the agent of its destruction? It is hard to say: from time to time, Mr Ahmadinejad and other officials have said explicitly that Iran poses no threat to Israel. Last month the president said that it was the Lebanese and the Palestinians who had “pressed the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime”. A week later the Speaker of the majlis, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, said during a visit to Kuwait that Mr Ahmadinejad's comments did not mean that Iran intended to attack Israel, only that “the Zionist entity” was on a “natural course of disintegration”.

For all the ambiguity, such talk helps to sow fear in Israel and corresponding delight in Arab countries, where Mr Ahmadinejad may now be more popular than he is at home. To that extent it has been a rational instrument of foreign policy. Such talk may also stem from a rational domestic calculation: hurling dire threats against Israel in the Khomeini manner helps rekindle the revolutionary fire that was allowed to cool under the reformists.

As to whether Mr Ahmadinejad is a new Hitler, one point to note is that he is neither Iran's dictator nor the master of its nuclear programme, which comes under the supervision of the supreme leader. That may not be so very reassuring. It implies that even if Mr Ahmadinejad were to shut up, or lose his job, the nuclear danger will remain.

Since Israel does not admit to having nuclear weapons, its detailed thinking on nuclear matters is rarely ventilated in public. But most of those Israeli experts willing to talk rate the chances of an Iranian nuclear attack as low. Despite Mr Ahmadinejad, most consider Iran to be a rational state actor susceptible to deterrence.

Knowing that Israel already possesses a very large nuclear arsenal, Iran would have to be ready to sacrifice millions of its own people to destroy the Jewish state, unless it was sure that in a first strike it could destroy Israel's ability to strike back. That would be hard, given that Israel is reported to have put nuclear weapons at sea on submarines, and has built sophisticated anti-missile defences expressly to protect its second-strike power. Furthermore, if Iran did obtain nuclear weapons, America might be willing to offer Israel (and other allies in the region) additional reassurance by saying—for whatever such a promise can be worth—that it would regard a nuclear attack on its ally as an attack on itself.

The calculus of destruction

Nonetheless, Ehud Olmert, its prime minister, has said that Israel cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iran.Whatever its policymakers think, its people have been spooked by Mr Ahmadinejad. And the sheer disparity in size between the countries (Iran's population is more than ten times Israel's, and its land area 75 times as big) leads some Israelis to question whether stable deterrence is possible between them. Israelis are haunted by a remark of Ayatollah Rafsanjani's in 2001, musing that a single nuclear weapon could obliterate Israel, whereas Israel could “only damage” the world of Islam.

Could ordinary life in Israel continue under such a threat? Even if Iran did not use its bomb, might not possession of it embolden it to attack Israel by conventional means, either directly or by using its allies in Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories? A further danger is that once Iran went nuclear, others in the region, such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, might feel compelled to follow. Hard as it would be for Israel to establish a deterrent balance with Iran, a cat's cradle of Middle Eastern nuclear face-offs would be an even darker nightmare.

Added together, these considerations might still tempt an Israeli government to try to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities before it can finish building a bomb. The Israelis have worked for years to obtain the weapons for such a strike, spending billions to procure long-range variants of the F15 and F16 fighter-bomber, for example. On the other hand, senior Israelis know that this would be fraught with danger.

Iran's nuclear targets are much further from Israel than was Iraq's Osiraq reactor, which Israeli aircraft destroyed in 1981. Most are more than 1,200km (750 miles) away, and Israel's aircraft would have to fly even farther to avoid Jordanian or Iraqi airspace. That, according to a study by Ephraim Kam of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, would require refuelling on both the outward and return flights, adding to the danger of interception. Osiraq, moreover, was a single target. Since there would be many this time, the attacking force would have to be large. And to cause serious damage, the aircraft might have to attack more than once.

Even a successful strike would not be the end of the story. For as the IAEA's Mr ElBaradei keeps saying, “you can't bomb knowledge.” Iran would be likely not only to retaliate with its long-range rockets but also to begin at once to rebuild its nuclear capability, just as Iraq did with extra urgency after Israel's destruction of Osiraq. That might not take long, says Mr Kam: Iran has its own nuclear raw material and already possesses much of the relevant knowledge and technology. Having spent only three years building Natanz from scratch, it could probably rebuild it much faster with the experience it has gleaned.

More worrying still is the possibility that Iran has secret nuclear sites outsiders do not know about: the existence of Arak and Natanz, remember, was not discovered until fairly recently. That could render an attack on the known ones pointless. And Mr Kam is surely right that an Israeli strike might unite Iran's people behind the regime and its nuclear aspirations.

Another alternative for Israel might be to attack Iran in order to start a sequence of events in which America eventually joins the fray. The Americans, naturally, would find the military job much easier than Israel. The Americans have a motive, too: not fear of annihilation, but fear that a nuclear-armed Iran would knock a hole in what is left of the non-proliferation regime and challenge American interests in the energy-rich Middle East. After Iraq, however, no American president could doubt that such an attack would deepen Muslim hatred of America. And Iran is not without means of retaliation, even against the superpower. It could strike America's already hard-pressed forces in Iraq, direct terrorism at America's friends or disrupt tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf, so causing mayhem in the energy markets.

That is why American and Israeli politicians alike, while refusing to take the threat of military action “off the table”, are probably being completely honest when they insist that force is a last resort and that they would prefer to stop Iran by means of diplomacy sharpened by economic sanctions. But can sanctions do the job, and can they do it in time?